CHAPTER SIX
Ana can feel the heat of the sun on her skin as it beats through the window. Although she has many fewer olfactory receptors than her guide dog, those she has are more sensitive now. She has his scent stored in some inner filing cabinet, easily accessed, and can tell that he is not far away. Almost certainly lying basking sleepily in the heat where sunlight falls in warm wedges across the floor.
She can smell Cristina’s shampoo. Some floral scent. But chemical somehow, like nothing found in nature. She can separate it from her niece’s perfume. But above all she can smell her gun. An unpleasant metallic smell. Sharp. Disagreeable. Cristina said they had taken it away for tests and only given it back to her today. Perhaps they had discharged it to check the ballistics, for Ana is sure she can identify the acrid reek of nitroglycerine – something she remembers from the chemistry lab at her secondary school. How long ago that seems now.
Outside, there are children playing in the Plaza de Juan Bazán, among the flowers that hang in profusion from pots fixed around its whitewashed walls. But she can’t hear the children. And will never see the red and pink blooms, or the shrubs that grow green around the tiny fountains catching sunlight in the late afternoon.
But though she can neither see nor hear she senses something else. Something in the air. Something that can only be felt. Divined in some way beyond her understanding.
It is fear. And it seeps, it seems, from every pore of the young woman sitting opposite.
In the normal course of events Cristina would come every other day, alternating with her sister. But since Nuri’s illness she has been more often. Taking her sister’s place on the days that Nuri is at the hospital in Marbella, or just too sick to get out of bed. Ana appreciates the visits from her late sister’s girls. A sister ten years her senior, and ten years dead, leaving Ana as her surrogate, a focus for the love of daughters for their lost mother. They are bright moments in the darkness that fills her each and every day, a delicious relief from the monotony of incarceration. Though it is technology which has released her finally from the confines of her physical self, her own body having raised an impenetrable barrier to the outside world, trapping her within, denying her sight and sound.
Sitting here in the window, with the sun warm on her skin, she now has that world at her fingertips. Literally. A keyboard linked to a computer that powers a screen that can generate Braille. She can surf the internet, reaching out to interpret the dots on her screen with long sensitive fingers, reading of world affairs, of history and scientific advance, or even just of family gossip on Facebook. With her keyboard she can interact with others online. She can place phone calls through a special operator, speak to someone at the other end, and have their responses relayed to her in Braille by the operator. The whole universe reduced to raised patterns of dots on a screen.
Sometimes she remembers what it was like to see and hear, but it is too painful to dwell upon it. You can never regain what is lost beyond retrieval.
Accept and adapt. That has been her constant mantra through most of the last twenty-five years, ever since she first learned of her impending self-imposed prison sentence. But even after all this time, acceptance of that life sentence is still the hardest part.
The anger has never subsided.
People think she has found solace in God. Her daily pilgrimage with Sandro to the church, holding his leash with a trust she would find it hard to place in any human being. Along to the end of Calle San Miguel, feeling the cobbles under her feet, the smell of meat that comes from the carniceria, fresh bread from the despacho de pan. Left into Calle Portada, heat spilling from the open door of the peluquería along with the acrid smell of peroxide and the pungent faux fruit of fresh shampoo. Careless people in a hurry, brushing past her, breathing garlic and smoke into warm morning air. Then right into Calle San Antonio and the long descent to the Iglesia Nuestra Señora de los Remedios in the Plaza San Francisco, inhaling the perfume of the flowers, the delicious aroma of fresh-ground coffee, the snacks in preparation in tapas bars near the foot of the street.
She feels the cool of the church the moment Sandro leads her through the doors. People come here to light their candles and kneel before the Virgin, praying for many things: a better life, pregnancy, wealth, good health. Ana kneels on the cold slabs, eyes closed, and silently vents her anger at the god who took away what others take for granted. Her sight, her hearing. Her life. If only she had been born deaf and blind she would never have missed those senses, would have known nothing else. But what cruelty was it to give her both, then take them away? What kind of god plays a trick like that?
So what others take for devotion is really recrimination, the anger she cannot let go. And after all, who else is there to blame?
Now she sits in her accustomed seat, feeling Cristina’s anxiety in the patterned dots that raise themselves on her screen. The whole sordid story told in graphic detail, from her fateful decision to answer the call in place of Diego, to the shooting of the girl in the villa. Sitting opposite, with her own keyboard and her own screen, she is typing almost faster than Ana can read, tension in every keystroke, apprehension in every word.
Ana is puzzled. She says, ‘But none of it is your fault, cariño. You hurt no one. This man killed his own lover.’
Cristina types rapidly.
– But it is me he
